For a guy who didn’t believe in marriage, it has been a  great 41 years.

As a product of the 60’s I was anti-establishment, anti-war, and anti-marriage.  After all, it was just a piece of paper. Who needed it when you could have all the benefits without going through the hoops of blood tests, ministers, and commitment?

Nevertheless, I accepted.  That’s right, Barb proposed to me.

Funny thing about our generation at the time; while we were ‘anti’ on the surface, we were far more traditional on the inside.  I wanted that commitment I didn’t believe in, and Barb, well, she was foot-loose and fancy-free.  Not the committed type I concluded.  I needed to move on.

The very night I intended to tell her to forget it, she was prepared to propose.  She says she had a dream about marrying me, and took it so seriously that she made the decision before I got there.  The rest is history.

Still, we shunned real commitment.  We wrote our own wedding vows-minus the vows.  We agreed that if it didn’t work, it didn’t work.

Well, it didn’t work.

The first year, as it is for many, was turbulent.  I realized I didn’t have anything to give Barb.  Unfortunately, she realized it too.  I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say that if it hadn’t been for a professor friend of hers who counseled her to stick it out, Barb and I would have been a statistic.  But when presented with a choice to leave or stay, Barb chose to stay.

Then it got worse.

You see, I was a flower child.  Not only had I rejected all semblance of normalcy, I also spurned the religion of my parent’s generation.  I was an existentialist, a young man without God.  Not a good thing to be when your life is in the hole and the only way out is up and the only way up is by God’s gracious hand.

But I wouldn’t have any of it. I had to do it my way.

To make a long story shorter, Barb hung with me through two years of rigid eastern religious discipline which deprived her of her marital rights while I frantically tried getting out of the pit I had dug for myself.

As a last resort, I yielded to this person named Jesus Christ.  Suddenly, life took  on new meaning and, well, I ‘discovered’ my wife.

One of the first things we did that year was take the real vows of marriage.  You know, “to have and to hold . . . ’till death do us part.”

That was over four decades, five children and ten grandchildren ago.

On our twenty-fifth anniversary we took the vows again.  In front of our dearest friends and in the presence of our pastor and God himself, we tied the knot a little tighter.

The writer of Ecclesiastes teaches, “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” (4:12).  In other words, it takes God to make a marriage work, to lend it strength, to hold it together.  After all, he instituted it.

If there is a proof that God is real – and proofs abound – it is, at least for Barb and me, that he blesses the relationship between a man and a woman who not only make a promise, but rely on him to keep it.